Rush Limbaugh Program - February 17, 2017, Friday, Hour #1

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Feb. 17, 2017 - Rush Limbaugh Program

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February 17, 2017, Friday, Hour #1

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	Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
	The views expressed by the host on this program have riveted the nation.
	The views expressed by the host on this program are heard in the White House.
	And it's about damn time for that too.
	Live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida.
	It's open line Friday.
	Yes, sir, we wrapping up a busy busy broadcast week.
	There isn't any downtime.
	There's no letdown.
	And we're gonna be here on Monday, by the way.
	It's President's Day, but I decided that I'm gonna be here.
	So we're gonna be here.
	Open Line Friday means that you can talk about whatever you want to talk about.
	It doesn't have to be what everybody else is talking about.
	It could be anything.
	800-282-2882, if you want to be on the program, the email address Ilrushbow at EIBNet.use uh dot us.
	I can also confirm that on Sunday I will be appearing on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace.
	And uh as of now, and you know anything can happen.
	Anything can happen, I could end up getting broomed.
	I doubt that.
	I think they would broom others before they brew me, but you never know.
	I mean, anything can happen.
	As of now, I am scheduled probably the second segment of the program, 12 to 13 minutes, is uh is the length of the segment, and I must ask all of you to understand something.
	12 to 13 minutes for me is just warming up to a topic.
	And Chris wants to talk about four or five, maybe six things in that twelve or thirteen minutes.
	It may be necessary for him to interrupt me.
	I promised him that I'm gonna be as brief as I can, that I'm going to practice over the weekend.
	Uh they're laughing.
	I'm gonna practice over the weekend, really getting in, getting it, and getting out.
	Uh that's all I need.
	In fact, I'm I may get up a little in a half hour early and just rehearse on Sunday before I get in here.
	But I really am.
	I'm gonna I'm gonna be because he gets worried when he when he has to interrupt me.
	He hears from you all who accuse him of being unfair uh to me and interrupting me and not letting me finish right when I'm about to hit the zinger.
	He will ask a question in your opinion, and then uh he gets more emails than he gets any other time.
	And I just I wanted to give him papal dispensation here that the interruptions that he makes are not intended to do anything but move the program along, and I told him I'm gonna help him out because as I say, I'm gonna be practicing brevity because as Shakespeare said, brevity is the soul of wit.
	So as of now, it's the second set.
	Well, I I'm assuming I'm always the second segment.
	They'll have um they'll start the program as some White House or other government guest, and uh, and then we'll get to me.
	And I you know, I keep telling him, you know what you ought to do is have me on and then have me in the round table to discuss me.
	Because I mean it's what's gonna happen.
	Nobody's ever done that before.
	Uh I probably would be able to add even more insight to what I said, commenting on what I said.
	It would be a television first.
	Has ever been done.
	A guest then ends up in the panel commenting on what the guest previously said.
	Someday it may happen.
	Well, uh, ladies and gentlemen, it was predictable.
	The reaction to President Trump's press conference yesterday.
	It really is hilarious.
	The drive-bys are still having kittens over the way Trump called them out for their fake news.
	And and yet they continue to publish fake news articles today.
	The big one, ready for this.
	The AP reported that Trump is on the verge of calling up 100,000 National Guard troops to start rounding up illegal aliens and throwing them out of the country.
	I saw the story big when I got in here today.
	It was it was headlined above the fold at drudge.
	So I clicked on it and I read it.
	And I thought, this is this doesn't make any sense.
	I mean, it didn't compute.
	And lo and behold, it's made up.
	What it was, according to the White House, Trump hasn't even seen it.
	It's part of the sausage making that goes on in every governmental department.
	Like the Pentagon has all kinds of operational plans for various circumstances that may happen in the future.
	And you have these battle plans ready to go, and they're constantly revised.
	Commanders are asking their underlings to come up with various plans, and memos are flying back and forth.
	And 99.9% of them never become policy, and they're never acted upon.
	It's just part of the way bureaucracies operate.
	And the White House does the same thing.
	And apparently this was a low-level memo that had been asked for by somebody in some department to deal with what might be a big emergency down the road, something was never seriously considered to be anything.
	You know, it's it's like that story that the Wall Street Journal ran yesterday morning with their big news alert on Wednesday night.
	And that is that the Intel in intelligence community has decided to withhold information from President Trump because A, they're not confident he won't share it with his friends, the Russians, and B, he's so incompetent and dangerous we can't trust the nation's secrets to the commander-in-chief.
	And that was the essence of the story.
	And they ran with it, and then they ran with it on Thursday after the alert on Wednesday night, and we later found out that there was literally nothing to this.
	And we've had the director of the Office of National Intelligence deny it, and Mike Pompeo, the new director of CIA, has denied it.
	It didn't happen.
	There's no an intelligence agents would not do something like this, we're being assured.
	What was what the truth was, and this is I mean it's incredible.
	And this is a great illustration of how fake news is operating today.
	It turns out that intelligence people and agencies and operatives are constantly feeding intel to the various department heads.
	You've got agents in the field, and you have analysts in the office, and they're making reports, producing reports on what's coming in, and not nearly all of it ever gets presented to the president.
	Very little of it ends up in a presidential daily brief.
	And so since you have the root of a story, there's intel not given to the president.
	Somebody called a Wall Street Journal and said, you know what?
	We're not sharing intel with the president.
	Well, yeah, 99.9% of it is never shared.
	There's no news here.
	What there was was a brand new narrative created.
	It was totally fake, that took a grain of truth and expanded it to a total falsehood and fakery to make it look like something new was happening with intelligence in this country when nothing new is happening.
	And this kind of thing continues today.
	This National Guard story is almost exactly the same kind of story with the same routing as that Wall Street Journal story on the fact that Trump is so dangerous.
	And by the way, this idea that that the Trump people were working with the Russians to sabotage Hillary, that that is not going to go away.
	I I the there are even more news reports today suggesting that there's literally no evidence.
	In fact, CNN, I'm going to get to this in more detail when I the program unfolds.
	CNN of all places has a report that after all of this, the FBI does not believe that Flynn lied to them about anything regarding the phone call that he had with a Russian ambassador.
	In other words, there's no there.
	In other words, Nothing.
	They can't find any evidence that there was any collusion at all.
	There's no evidence the Russians tampered with the votes.
	None.
	Zilch Zero.
	There aren't even any serious allegations about that.
	There are no serious allegations, and there is no evidence the Russians had anything to do with the actual voting process in this country.
	Zilch Zero Nada.
	There is no evidence that Trump colluded with the Russians on their efforts to expose what was going on in Podesta Z mail in the Democrat National Committee Computer Network.
	They can't find any evidence, and yet the narrative of that story continues to be what is driving the media and the Democrat Party's efforts to get rid of Donald Trump.
	That the Russians hacked the election, that the Russians impacted the outcome of the election, that Trump was in contact with the Russians during the campaign, but that there's no evidence.
	But it doesn't mean they say that there's still not something there.
	And it it's all of this fakery continues to drive all of these other fake narratives.
	And that's why a bunch of journalists stood up just, can you promise that you had no contact with with Russian officials during the election?
	I none.
	I don't know nobody.
	During the election, I mean during the election, can you promise?
	Can you?
	Story's been asked and answered for months.
	They continue to ask about it.
	What they're hoping for now is that somebody makes a mistake, says something different than what they said previously, which then constitute deception or a lie, and that they can then zero in on them.
	So there is no plan to deploy a hundred thousand National Guard troops somewhere throughout America to find illegal aliens and throw them over the wall.
	Throw them over the fence.
	There is no such operation.
	But my guess is the genie's out of the bottle on that.
	You never know how many people saw the original story and still think that it is operative.
	Let's go to audio sound by C one and two.
	Remember the name Tony Schaefer.
	Tony Schaefer, former CIA analyst.
	And he was on a Fox Business Network program called Risk and Reward, Elizabeth McDonald, the host.
	And they were talking about the resignation of Michael Flynn.
	This was Wednesday night.
	And Elizabeth McDonald said there have been leaks about phone calls between the president and leaders of Australia and Mexico, as well as the investigation into the Russian alleged interference and the hacks into the DNC.
	Are leaks by Obama officials a problem?
	Absolutely.
	And I put this right at the feet of John Brennan and Jim Clapper.
	And I would even go so far as say the White House was directly involved before they left.
	I'd put this to Ben Rhodes and those folks.
	Let's be clear on this.
	I've watched this very carefully, the coverage.
	And when you have NBC reporting that they've talked to six officials who have seen the transcript, someone is basically giving away both sensitive methods, the fact that they read a communication that was intercepted by sensitive methods, and more importantly, that they're saying that they saw this information, which was beyond top secret, which tells me that clearly someone had to have access to that, and that is a key issue.
	I just want you to understand what this is.
	This Tony Schaefer, a former CIA analyst saying that it is Obama officials in the shadow government who are leaking all of this.
	We know that the Obama and his team were investigating Trump all through the campaign.
	But I want to take you back to, I think it was September last year, where Barack Obama assured everyone that the White House put out a bunch of statements.
	I think Obama even said it on TV, that the Russians were not having, did not have an and were not having any kind of an impact whatsoever on the election and on American voting.
	And they did this for a host of reasons.
	They wanted to a make it look like that they're fully competent and aware of things, and they didn't.
	They expected Hillary to win this, folks.
	You go back to September, you go back to August, you go back to October.
	They expected Hillary Clinton to win this in a landslide.
	The last thing they wanted was anybody thinking the Russians were helping her.
	They didn't want Hillary's win to be tainted in any way.
	So Obama very publicly reminded everybody that these stories about the Russians hacking were not having any effect whatsoever.
	And despite having said that and saying that, Obama and his team began investigating Trump during the campaign over all of the so-called Russian ties because you tell me why.
	If they expected Hillary to win in a landslide, and they didn't want her win to be tainted by supposedly being held by the Russians, why were they investigating Trump?
	Why were they investigating Trump and these supposed ties to the Russians?
	There has to be an answer to that question, and it's if you ask me, the answer is going to be nefarious, and I could probably come up with it with a couple of blind stabs in the dark as to as to what they were doing.
	You might say, well, they had to cover themselves.
	Maybe Hillary blows up and loses, and they have a way to discredit Trump's win for the sake of the Democrat Party, not just Hillary.
	But regardless, they have been investing.
	My point is they have been investigating Trump, and he has alleged tie and his campaign's ties to the Russians all during the campaign for the purposes of messing with the election.
	And there's no evidence, folks.
	Nobody's produced any evidence, and the FBI finally, they've heard the transcript of the Flynn call, which Mr. Schaefer here was just talking about.
	That transcript should be released.
	Because it's being cherry-picked now.
	It's being excerted, much the way 60 minutes edits interviews.
	It's being cherry-picked.
	That transcript could be fully released.
	People who've heard it are admitted.
	There's nothing.
	Flynn didn't do anything here.
	I mean, we can't find any evidence.
	In other words, CNN's reporting that Flynn may not even be charged with anything here.
	That's how little they've got.
	They got a scalp.
	They got a scalp, but they don't have a shred of evidence that this election was anything other than a buff board.
	And here's Mr. Schaefer now acknowledging that Obama, deep state operatives, are the ones leaking all this stuff.
	Let's take a break as Open Line Friday continues to unfold.
	We'll be right back after this.
	One more bite from Tony Schaefer, again, this Wednesday night on the Fox Business Network with Elizabeth McDonald.
	She said, would you would you support a bipartisan push about Republicans and Democrats demanding an independent probe into Flynn?
	Do you support that?
	Oh, yeah, because the fingers that uh they're going to be finding are pointing back at the former White House and some Democrats.
	The Democrats have been behind this, and I would go so far to say some of the Republicans have also been involved in some of the leaks.
	So bring it on.
	I think it's a good idea, and I think, like we saw in the Detroit recount when they were recounting Michigan's votes, turned out to be voter fraud in all these Democrat precincts.
	I think it's what we're going to find here, so go right ahead.
	So he's saying don't be afraid, even if it's a bipartisan investigation into Flynn, because what they're going to find out is who did it.
	And they're going to find all these Obama career people in the deep state in the bureaucracy, the unelected portions of the bureaucracy, just like when Jill Stein went out, started her recount to try to prove that there was election fraud, they found out that it was Trump who had been cheated out of votes, not Hillary.
	Now there are some Republicans that are sounding like they want a joint investigation of Flynn.
	And I don't think they should be confused with Schaefer here.
	The Republicans that are joining this idea, we need to have a serious congressional investigation.
	They think that Flynn's done something wrong and they're into a CYA mode.
	It's typical, it's not all the Republicans, I think Walter Jones in North Carolina's one, but these guys, you know, they they live the formula that Republicans have lived in Washington for all these many years, and that is constantly on defense.
	They're always in their minds going to lose.
	And when the media gets this fevered about something, you don't stand up to them.
	UK, you go along with it just to keep yourself out of the crosshairs.
	And Schaefer's saying, yeah, I don't mind an investigation, but I'm not afraid of it for that reason.
	I think we'll find out who actually was behind all of this.
	Because it's illegal.
	And he clearly expects that a legitimate investigation would expose many of the Obama holdovers that are actually engaging in an effort to sabotage the Trump presidency.
	And the media is fully aboard on board with the that.
	Try this headline, New York Post, it's a bloodbath at the State Department.
	This is an excellent bit of news.
	Hang on, folks.
	I'm just checking a later-arriving alert that I got here that I wasn't able to read the whole thing because the program is now resumed.
	Welcome back, my friends, open line Friday.
	Rushland bought 800 282-2882.
	The New York Post has the story that Rex Tillerson, a new Secretary of State, is cleaning house at the State Department, according to a report, staffers in the offices of the Deputy Secretary of State for management and resources, as well as counselor, were shown the door yesterday, according to CBS News.
	Many of those let go were on the building's seventh floor.
	That's where the big shots offices are, the top floor.
	A symbolically important sign to the rest of the diplomatic corps that their new boss has different priorities than the last one.
	The staffing changes came as Tillerson was on his first foreign trip attending a G20 meeting in Bonn, Germany.
	I don't know that this has happened to this extent in the time I have been paying attention to what goes in Washington.
	You know, folks, about the State Department.
	I I um I have to admit that for much of even my adult life, I have had a naivety about me.
	And despite what is clearly there to see and learn in front of my face, I've always just assumed that it didn't matter which party, that the people at the State Department really were there.
	To put the United States first, the United States interests.
	That's why they were there.
	That's what the State Department was.
	It took me the longest time as a young person to figure out what the Department of State meant, what it did and all that.
	And then the same thing at the Pentagon.
	And the only government agency I was ever, you know, curious about was the IRS.
	But everything else, I just assumed that there was a an identifiable and common patriotism among people that work there.
	The naivete was my belief that all Americans love America.
	My naivete was that all Americans appreciate the achievements and the accomplishments of the United States in becoming the force for good in the world, becoming the real lone superpower in the world, the bastion and beacon for freedom.
	And I I can remember when I learned that and wasn't true.
	I was a combination of disappointed and shocked.
	Now, this is not recent.
	I'm I'm talking 30 years ago, but I was still an adult.
	I was, I I remember being shocked when I was told the lay of the land, told the truth, that there are people in the State Department who want to undermine Republican presidents.
	There are people in the State Department who do not think the United States is the solution.
	And it's all been part of my self-education and awareness project about liberalism.
	Because the learning, the education, the becoming informed about these various intricacies and involvement have coincided with what I've learned about liberalism.
	And so even though I knew, even after beyond the days of my naivety, when I had awakened and discovered what really was going on in parts of these agencies.
	Like I was at the same time, I learned that not every general in the Pentagon wants to win wars.
	Some of them don't want to fight them, some of them, I mean, all they are, they politically correct generals and they want to climb the ranks by engaging in whatever political objectives their superiors have.
	Whether they're good or bad for the United States.
	And then you have the warrior generals that I thought they all were back in my days of naivety.
	It just didn't compute.
	When I first realized this, it just didn't compute that we actually would have in the department, given how many people live in America and the pool of people to choose from to go out and find the absolute best who believe in America, the fact that we populated that place with people who didn't.
	Why would anybody do this?
	I started asking all the obvious questions that people who are on the cusp of learning things that shock them.
	I went through all of that.
	And then the next stage was well, why don't we get rid of those people when we acquire power?
	Why would say an incoming Republican president keep people in the State Department who are there to actively undermine his agenda because they disagree with him politically, and who believe the United States is the problem in the world and not the solution.
	Or people who believe the United States has caused so many problems that we we owe the world so much because of how much we've what?
	Screwed people, we've mistreated people, we've stolen resources, whatever it is.
	I've never understood why.
	Like when Bush, George W. Bush, after he was inaugurated in 2001, because of the acrimony of the Florida recount and the massive disputes over the legitimacy of his win.
	Remember that when they said the Supreme Court stopped the recount when Gore was on the verge of pulling ahead.
	And they still to this day believe that.
	I mean, I understood part of me why Bush didn't clean house, because he was trying to show that he was going to be president of all the people, and he was going to uh demonstrate he could be a compassionate conservative and work with everybody.
	And it all came back to by the look at his administration.
	The guy was undermined daily by his own government.
	And this is the intellectually, this has just been one of the hardest things for me to understand.
	And I've asked people who are very close with that world, and they they're not nearly as surprised by as I am, because it's where they live, it's what they do, it's just the way Washington operates.
	So when I this is a long way around to telling you that when I see this headline, it's a bloodbath at the State Department.
	My reaction is finally, it's about time.
	So here we have Rex Tillerson, who's a new Secretary of State for Trump, going in there, and they're weaving out all these people that they can identify who are going to be standing in their way.
	They have every right to do this.
	I don't care whether shadow operatives in the Obama years or the Clinton years.
	I don't care if they're career appointees, get rid of them, give them their pensions, whatever they get, but get rid of them.
	Get your own people in there.
	I've never understood why the Republicans do not take that all the way.
	And I'm happy to see it here.
	Because this is the battlefield on which we are waging war, and the Democrats do this.
	Democrats assume power, and the first thing they do is go through the Department of Justice and find out who's going to be standing in their way, and they get rid of remember Jay Christian Adams.
	He ended up resigning when Eric Holder said there aren't going to be any prosecutions of the new Black Panther Party and their obvious voter fraud in Philadelphia because there have been too many prosecutions of my people, Holder said, or something like that.
	So we're going to cut them some slack.
	And it was his division in the Justice Department, J. Christian Adams, that was doing the investigation.
	So he resigned, and he made no bones about why.
	Okay.
	So the Democrats do this constantly.
	They get rid of people at the Pentagon, they get rid of all of the U.S. Clinton came and fired every U.S. attorney in uh in 1993.
	So it's a long way around saying this is a good move and it's overdue.
	And I think it's that's another bit of evidence the things that Trump and his people are doing that just have the Washington establishment live it, just livid.
	All right, a brief time out.
	As you know, the president cited me in an early morning tweet today in the 7 a.m. hour, thanking me for my characterization of his press conference yesterday, and by virtue of that,
	uh I think acknowledging that he is appreciative of the fact that I get him, that I understand who he is, where he is, where he came from, where he's going, how he survives, how he works.
	I frankly don't think there's anybody else in media that understands Trump any better than I do.
	And I say that with no Braggado show.
	I say that with no airs of anything.
	I just factually believe it to be the case.
	Um there's a political story on on Trump tweeting me.
	There's a there's a uh Hill.com story and Daily Mail.
	The Daily Mail, interesting, is a little snarky, even though we constantly refer to the Daily Mail and we hype them here and uh and and praise their work.
	They were a little snarky, not big snark.
	It was uh it was minor snark.
	And then CNN, this is a story I also want to get into, most memorable lines from the Trump press conference.
	And it's it's classic.
	The lines that they cite are the lines that they think everybody should be appalled by.
	The quotes that they put from Trump in this story are obviously quotes that they think everybody's gonna be appalled and offended and outraged by because they are.
	And what they don't understand is that just a whole lot of people who read this story are gonna be laughing themselves silly and they're gonna be applauding while CNN thinks that they are doing great damage to Trump.
	That also reminds me of something that uh has happened to me along the same lines, almost identically, except with a different group.
	In the meantime, another brief obscene profit timeout will be right back.
	Don't go away.
	Meeting and surpassing all audience expectations every day.
	Great to have you here.
	Open line Friday.
	We always go to the phones, we try to anyway, in the first hour, and we're gonna start with Julie in Temecula, California.
	Great to have you.
	How are you?
	Hi, hi.
	Thank you for having me.
	Okay, I'll try and make this brief.
	But um, the Democrats, of course, are thrilled that Flit it out.
	Um he is extremely knowledgeable, especially about ISIS, and we and the and President Obama wanted him out.
	And so he this is such a such a bad deal that he's out.
	But this is what I'm thinking.
	I'm thinking that can Trump and Kent have a heart to heart with him on the trust issue, because I think that if they do this, they could probably have more trust between the three of them and everyone else, if he does that.
	And the Democrats, I heard one media source saying that K that Trump caved in like a house of cards, and they were laughing about it.
	So they got out the most Feared person.
	They were so fearful of Flynn and what he knows and what he knows about ISIS and how to defeat and all kinds of levels.
	I mean, you know more than I, and obviously Trump does, of the level of knowledge and wisdom that Flynn brings.
	And if the media comes back, if he does this, and the media comes back and just has a field day on him.
	Can he make up his mind?
	Or what's wrong with this guy?
	Any anything they throw at him, who cares?
	This is for our country, and I know Trump wants good people, and he is a good people he person.
	He would be a good asset.
	Do you know Flynn personally?
	Do you know Flynn personally?
	No, I don't.
	I'm just I live in Temecula, California, and I I love Trump and I love what he does.
	And um I think he wants, I truly believe that Trump cares about our country.
	And I've seen him in his, you know, in his humility and knowing he wants to be there for all of it.
	No, no, no, I I I don't disagree with that.
	It's just you're making the case for Flynn as though you or somebody you know knows Trump.
	No, I just see because Trump Trump has always his whole life from what I can see, surrounds himself with a bat.
	And I think that he should, you know.
	Well, let me let me stop you here because the first thing I want to share with you is I don't think your scenario is ever gonna happen officially.
	They will never I mean it might have a hard heart with Flynn, but there will never be an official welcoming him back into any official capacity in the administration.
	That isn't gonna happen.
	It isn't it w it wouldn't be necessary.
	And by the way, can't do it now after you have uttered the reason why you got rid of him.
	I just couldn't trust him.
	But but uh Julie, let me tell you something.
	There's a lot about this.
	I said at the end of the program yesterday, because I got an email after engaging in effusive praise for Trump in the press conference.
	I got an email.
	Is there anything that you didn't like?
	Is there anything that bothers you with I said, yeah, this whole Flynn situation, something about it doesn't sit right.
	And and here, let me try to I'll practice my brevity here.
	Uh in advance of Fox News Sunday.
	Everything we know suggests Flynn didn't do anything.
	CNN has a story, the FBI is not even going to prosecute him, so he didn't talk about sanctions.
	He just listened while the Soviet ambassador did, but he didn't commit to anything.
	He did tell Pence something that wasn't true.
	And he sent Pence out saying things on national TV that were not true.
	That is curious.
	But on the other side of this, Flynn didn't do anything.
	He he did not he did not do anything wrong.
	So why how did how did this blow up to be such a big deal?
	And it there's more to it than just, well, the Democrats, they get to set the narrative.
	The media gets to set the narrative, and the narrative is that Trump and Flynn were secretly negotiating with the Russians and who knows whatever, trying to undermine Obama's sanctions and so forth.
	We that that that wasn't true.
	But there clearly was something that wasn't going well.
	There's something wasn't sitting right.
	And the decision was made somewhere within the administration to let Flynn go, and they they settled on that.
	Well, he just did it that we need trust.
	All during that presser yesterday.
	President Trump did nothing but sing Flynn's praises, how much he likes him, how much he respects him, how quiet it didn't sound like the characterizations of somebody you've just had to dismiss from your administration.
	So I don't I don't know enough to even speculate possibilities.
	Could there be power struggles?
	Was somebody in there that wants Flynn's job, somebody in there close to Trump that just didn't like Flynn, somebody in there that got to said Flynn's dangerous, he's uh is a walking powder keg, you need to limit the damage now.
	I don't know.
	But none Of what the allegations were have happened.
	He didn't talk to the Russians, didn't talk about sanctions.
	He listened while the Russian ambassador did.
	No charges.
	FBIs heard the transcript of the call.
	Nothing went wrong.
	The only thing that happened was he told Pence that he hadn't done any of that when he in fact had.
	Fastest three hours in media.
	The first hour is already in the can.
	But we've got so much more coming up, my friends, including your exciting phone calls and whatever I have left in the stack, which is a lot of really, really hot stuff.

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